hive-user mailing list archives

I notice from the Hive locking wiki page
<https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/Hive/Locking> that locks may
be acquired for a range of HQL DDL operations. I wanted to know how the
locking scheme mapped mapped/employed by equivalent operations in the
Metastore and HCatalog APIs. Consider the operation:
alter table T1 drop partition P1
This apparently requires a shared lock on T1 and an exclusive lock on P1.
However, when following the invocation chain on the equivalent APIs I can
see no acquisition of such locks:
HCatClient.dropPartitions(...)
IMetaStoreClient.dropPartition(...)
I notice that IMetaStoreClient exposes methods to lock and unlock resources
and I have used these when working with the ACID APIs. However I can find
nothing similar on the HCatalog API. As a user of these APIs:
1. Do I need to acquire/release locks as declared on the wiki page when
using equivalent operations in these APIs?
2. If not, why not?
3. Ideally, should the HCatClient also expose lock/unlock methods like
the Metastore API?
4. If not, why not?
Thank you - Elliot.